[SetBuilder]

Originally Posted by steve B

A few comments on a couple points.

T206s are lithographed for sure. Other types of printing come across a lot differently.
There are two main sorts of lithography, direct and offset.
Both use either a specially prepared block of limestone, or a plate that can retain water. Commercially, the plates have been mostly metal for around a century. But a "lithograph" plate can be paper. In fact you can make a lithograph at home using some porous paper, a crayon, a brayer and some oil based ink. (Getting it to come out any good isn't all that easy)

T206s were not done with a modern CMYK process. The typically quoted thing is six colors, but it's usually more like 8, possibly more.

Recess printing is essentially like Intaglio, and the result is much different than lithography. Feel a new banknote, you'll be able to feel the raised in since it mostly sits on top of the paper.

The multi color press shown doesn't appear to be an offset lithography press, as the inked rollers are shown printing directly to the paper.

The stones were heavy, and had to be laid out by hand from transfers. Making them and resurfacing them was a specialty, and making a stone cylinder with the proper surface would be harder and more expensive. I've never heard of a press that printed from a stone cylinder.

Here's a small shop from around 1917. The big press on the left is a flatbed lithographic press, the small ones center and right are letter press presses.

ALC was a huge company, and owned a wide range of presses. They were also pretty tight with RS Hoe company that made presses. (Not that a place like ALC wouldn't be on great terms with a few press makers. ) Hoe had web fed typographic presses - a totally different process- in the 1800s that were used to print newspapers. They also had web fed presses, but none of their literature that I've found mentions web feed combined with lithography.
They also in around 1910 sued a couple guys who had sold them on a photographic way of making lithographic plates, which apparently turned out to be a scam as the process didn't work and never would. And was also "sold" to other companies as far away as England. So photographically transferred halftones were very cutting edge at the time.
A book about printing processes from 1917 mentions metal plates, but still has them being laid out by hand from transfers, so photographic reproduction wasn't being done on a large scale.

Steve,

That shop in the photo looks like an old school Kinkos store instead of a large operation.

ALC was a large sophisticated operation with rotary machines. They had to be. T206 cards alone were printed in the millions. Let's say 300 million cards were printed, at 34 cards per sheet, that's 8.8mm+ sheets. Plus all the other stuff they printed. I doubt that the press was anything other than a modern offset litho press with durable metal plates.

The technology was available at the time. My guess by looking at the T206 cards under magnification is that a half-tone screen was placed over the silhouette of the player on the printing plate. Think of it like a screen door on a frame with a stylus. The engraver would press down on the screen lightly for half-tones and press down harder for shadows. The underside of the mesh was inked, which was to be the acid resist for the relief engraving.





This was very simple technology so I'm not sure how Knapp was fooled.

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